


Without You

by faerywhimsy (persephone20)



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Hurt No Comfort, M/M, Season/Series 02-03 Hiatus
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-19
Updated: 2012-03-19
Packaged: 2017-11-02 04:55:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,313
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/365206
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/persephone20/pseuds/faerywhimsy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock's actions post-Reichenbach leave him with PTSD. John attempts to help.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Without You

**Author's Note:**

  * For [belovedmuerto](https://archiveofourown.org/users/belovedmuerto/gifts).



> Inspired by this lovely work, [ In Pieces.](http://archiveofourown.org/chapters/474040)
> 
> Something a little more dark, than my [ If Convenient...](http://archiveofourown.org/works/341796/chapters/553535) adventures.

Sherlock has done terrible things. 

In the television shows, at this part of the movie, the bad guys seem to just turn off their emotions and commit heinous acts without remorse. 

Sherlock doesn't have a turn off switch for his emotions. For a long time, he'd thought his emotions were just permanently switched off. He doesn't think that anymore.

Sherlock garrotts another person in Moriarty's network. It's a quick, relatively mess free, to kill a man. There's the bonus of not leaving much in the way of evidence for the police to track. Sherlock mixes it up every so often. Just in case.

*

It doesn't take very long after his plan has been put into actions for Sherlock to realise he has made a very big mistake. He can't get the last minutes with John out of his head and he knows--he just _knows_ \--if he's having this much trouble, how much worse it's likely to be for John. The old Sherlock could have come up with a mathematical formula dictating the strain on John vs. Sherlock. The new Sherlock goes on what's inside him.

It feels like his heart is being ripped out. 

"Get a hold of yourself," Mycroft snaps at him. Sherlock looks at him, and all he can think of is he doesn't understand. _You don't understand._

He goes along with the plan anyway, because plans are there to be gone along with. Can't fuck it up now, can't risk fucking it up so much now that the point of putting him and John through this much pain was for no reason.

Just, every time he kills another man--washes that blood off his skin, throws away soiled clothes--Sherlock whispers one name. _John. John._ Until the name loses so much of its original meaning and takes on the whole of the reason why he is doing this. Doing any of this.

*

He always thought he knew what a high-functioning sociopath was. What he realises now is that he knows what other people thought _he_ was. They are wrong. Every last damned one of them. Mycroft, who once fancied himself Sherlock's greatest nemesis, knows him least of all. 

Nobody knows him like John did. He can't even think of John--short, blonde, kind eyes, warm--for what he's going to have put him through. Can't put that face to the name. John is just the word that means the reason why he is doing all of this.

*

Time has passed; it might have been years, weeks, days, months. Sherlock is freshly showered, shaved, and clothes; none of it matters. Nobody can look at a person's outsides, as the things they are wearing, or the way that they smell, and think that you know what is going on inside of them. It can't be done, otherwise everyone on the way here would have known that this outfit is merely the thin outer shell of a shattered man whose insides have been cut to pieces.

Sherlock might have been able to observe that, once. Not anymore.

It was funny, in a way. He'd always thought of PTSD as a thing in someone's head, another thing for the mind to overcome. Just another thing he doesn't think anymore; add it to the list. It's a long, long list. When he'd first met John, he dismissed any concerns of PTSD as psychosomatic, and stress. It's a wholly different experience to feel like you are sitting inside yourself, looking out of your eyes and trying not to cringe every time a person looks your way. Trying not to flinch when a person walks in your direction. That's what Sherlock feels on the way to Baker St. For a man who has always been able to see absolutely everything, it feels like a curse to him now. Sharp noises of doors slamming or children crying out make him want to dart inside of himself and never come back out.

At the street entrance to 221B Baker St, he raises his hand to knock. Pauses. Tries the door. It opens and then, after a short hesitation, Sherlock takes the first step inside. The second. Before, he might have shown disapproving concern that the door had been left unlocked. Now, he just thinks about taking the third stair. 

Five whole minutes later, Sherlock is standing at the door to the apartment upstairs that he once shared with John. He's scared to face him. He doesn't know... doesn't know what kind of a reaction to expect.

Anther deep breath. Sherlock can't bring himself to knock at this door either, can't bring himself to have to stand and wait for the uncertain moment when somebody else will open the door. He'd rather take the power--what power he still has--into his own hands. When he tries, this door too is unlocked.

At first, everything looks the same. Sherlock exhales and, for a solid minute, it is all he can do to look around the room, taking everything in. About halfway through that minute, he starts to notice the little differences around the place; books that have been put in different places, objects that are missing from the shelves, new belongings piled up on surfaces. Not much has changed, and everything has changed. 

When he turns around, he finds John staring at him. Sherlock's lips part, and he tries to mouth, "John," but can't, because John isn't the name of this man, this one person in his life who he's ever let in. John is the name of the reason why he did all of this. His mouth goldfishes open and closed, unable to make words.

John, he finds, has no such difficulties. "I wondered when you'd be back."

The words are so softly said, so _calmly_ said. Sherlock can't believe this is his friend who he left behind, his friend who was meant to be as devastated as Sherlock, only more. How can he be this calm, this _unmoved_ , by Sherlock's sudden reappearance into his living room, as to simply continue to move past him into the kitchen?

Again, he tries to force words past his throat. Only then does he realise how long it's been since he spoke out louder than a whisper. Not much cause to talk out loud when... _killing_. That word he's afraid to say, even in his head, for fear that it will consume him, become the only thing that he is.

He tries to shove it away, and follows John. 

"John." Successfully, he forces the word out. It sounds raw, grating, to Sherlock's ears, but that might just be the voice saying it. No way to know, really. He takes a breath, trying to ready himself to speak more words. "Why are you... Why aren't you... surprised... to see me?"

John looks to him in some dull surprise, but then the surprise seeps out of his face, and only the dullness remains.

"I see you all the time." John looks weary. As he turns his face away, his head shakes. "I never stop seeing you."

It takes a moment for Sherlock to be able to grasp the significance of the statement. And then he knows that _this_ is hell.

"John, I haven't been here. I've been..." Sherlock's mind goes blank. He wants to say the words that will make things more clear for John, wants to tell him where he's been, why he hasn't been here for John all this time. He just... can't.

John stares at him blankly while Sherlock sinks into a puddle of his own impotence. After a while, he turns to make himself some tea.

Sherlock steps forward. "Is there enough tea for... two?"

Still looking at the kettle, John smiles. For a moment, Sherlock's heart leaps, thinking this has all been an elaborate ruse, some small way to pay him back for the anguish John's gone through, and Sherlock will accept that and never say a word. Then he realises John's shaking his head.

"I'm not falling for that again," John says, this time without looking at him, and Sherlock's stomach drops. He imagines a scenario where John holds out a mug of tea to a Sherlock only John can see. John lets go of the mug and it falls to the kitchen floor, shattering.

Sherlock slumps, the very last of his emotional reserves sucked up by the fact that John really thinks he's a hallucination.

*

It takes a full four days for Sherlock to convince John that he really is real, that he really is back, that this isn't just another hallucination from John's desperate mind. 

In the end, Sherlock wonders if it isn't his own desperate emotional state that pulls John out of his. There are pills lined up in the bathroom they used to share. Sherlock doesn't want to look at them too closely, but he can guess what they would be. He thinks he can guess.

In the morning of the fifth day, John blinks bleary eyes across the room at a Sherlock who hasn't yet gone to sleep, who may never sleep again. 

"Sherlock...?" His brow furrows. As he blinks, his eyes are becoming more clear. Sherlock wonders if his best friend--his only friend--is about to see clearly for the first time since he returned, or whether that's just what Sherlock so desperately wants to see. "Is that... really you...?"

Sherlock breaks down and cries.

*

Sherlock used to think that PTSD was a thing in one's head, something for the mind to overcome, but John's own experience have taught him otherwise. With that in his past, and in his capacity as a doctor of medicine, John is able to prescribe a handful of drugs from his own prescription to deal with the worst of Sherlock's anxiety and triggers.

He steadfastly refuses to talk about anything tied to the time in between his jump from St. Barts Hospital and his arrival back in their shared apartment some time thereafter. As a few more days pass, Sherlock refuses to talk of even the days before John woke up and recognised Sherlock for really being there.

John doesn't try to get him to talk about anything he doesn't want to talk about--he's a doctor of medicine, not a psychologist--but he lets Sherlock speak, and holds him in the nights when speaking is the only thing that keeps the night terrors away. 

If Sherlock's words trigger anything of John's own past, he only scrunches his eyes shut, and holds Sherlock tighter, but he never interrupts him, never tells him to stop, that it's too much. And, eventually, more of the story gets uncovered.

Sherlock shakes and cries and cries out until it seems inevitable that Mrs. Hudson will come knocking on their door the next morning to find out what all the fuss is about. She never does. 

John tenderly thumbs dark strands of Sherlock's hair out of his face when sweat has plastered them to his forehead and his eyes are as wide as they get when the terror takes him. Sometimes it doesn't seem like Sherlock sees John at all. Sometimes it's clear that, in his mind, he's still hunting Moriarty's men. John does his best to bring him back to himself.

*

It's four in the morning, and Sherlock has been silent for 20 minutes, but neither one of them are close to sleep. Sherlock is so highly strung that it's obvious when some of the tension leaves him. He looks up into John's face, and John is there waiting for him.

"Do you really forgive me?" he says. He's gotten better at talking again, so much better. Now the rasp only enters his voice when he's been talking for hours, like he has been tonight. John leans over and takes up a glass of water from the night stand, hovering it before Sherlock's lips until Sherlock takes a drink. Sherlock's eyes never leave John's. "Do you really forgive me, for leaving you like I did?"

"Yes, Sherlock. I've forgiven you that for a long time," John says softly, gently. How could he not?

More tension seeps from Sherlock's frame, and John adjusts the way he's sitting as more of Sherlock's weight comes to rest on his arm. "Good," he says on a sigh. "I couldn't take it if you didn't forgive me too."

John frowns, and it's clear that Sherlock's words have perplexed him. "Who else doesn't forgive you?" he asks, but then it's obvious. The other person. Of course it's Sherlock.

Sherlock with emotions. Emotions enough, it seems, to make up for three decades without. 

"Sherlock, you..." John trails off, seeming to have run out of words to help him through this last hurdle tonight. Instead, he rests his head against Sherlock's, breathes him in, tries to breathe out that calming breath cycle that Ella walked him through when he first started seeing her. "This is going to get better. You're going to be alright," he says.

Against his jaw, Sherlock nods his head obediently.

*

In front of Sherlock, John manages to hide his fury at Mycroft for his cold, heartless way of dealing with an obviously fragile Sherlock, for consistently lying to John about Sherlock's death, for one hundred and one things he can't change and can't do a damned thing about now. 

He hides his fury beneath a veneer of calm until it almost seems like the natural thing. It is what Sherlock needs and, in the moment, Sherlock's needs are more important than any hurt feelings that John suffers from. The hallucinations are gone, never to return from the time that the real Sherlock stepped back into their flat. 

Another thing John hides is the fear that, one moment, he will wake to realise this has been merely the most elaborate hallucination yet. It's a fear grows more remote each day, but doesn't quite disappear.

*

**Author's Note:**

> For the whole time I was writing this, I had NO IDEA how the next part of it was going to go. One thing I know for sure, no way this is the way Moffitt and Gatiss will take the beginning of next season. But, my oh my, was it an interesting piece to write.


End file.
